EigenU 2025 Wrap-up

The 19th Eigenvector University wrapped up on Friday, May 16. A little smaller this year, we had 32 students from locations as far away as Milan, Italy and Santiago, Chile. EigenU 2025 started with online classes the week before including the new “Introduction to PLS_Toolbox and Solo” developed by our Lyle Lawrence. In person classes started Monday, May 12 at the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle with “Chemometrics I: Principal Components Analysis.” This year Neal Gallagher and I covered the teaching duties for this class on PCA, arguably the most important method in modern data science. And in spite of the fact that I’ve taught this 100+ times over 30+ years I’m still enthusiastic to do so. PCA is just so useful and the insights gained from it are often significant, and, well, it’s just fun to see what’s in data sets!

The rest of the EVRI staff caught up with us on Monday evening. As always, EigenU is an opportunity for us to get together and we enjoyed a nice dinner at Tulio on Tuesday (below). This is a rare photo in that it includes Jill, my spouse and the person that runs the Eigenvector “back office.” It is always great to have the whole crew together!

Eigenvector staff including (from left) Lyle Lawrence, Manny Palacios, Barry Wise, Jill Wise, Scott Koch, Nate Watson, Donal O’Sullivan and Bob Roginski.

Wednesday night we were at the Top of the WAC with the “PowerUser Tips & Tricks” session where the EigenGuys take turns presenting their favorite underutilized or new software feature. Also the “PLS_Toolbox/Solo User Poster Session” was held, where users get to share analyses they’ve been working on. This year’s best poster winners were Shirmir Branch with “Using PLS_Toolbox for the Analysis of Complex Molten Salt Chemistry” and Benjamin Panitz with “Development of a Chemometrics Model for Rapid Fish Egg Quality Assessment in Aquaculture.” Both of these posters addressed really interesting issues. Shirmir’s involved developing methodology to monitor metals including radioactive elements in the molten salt cooling system in nuclear reactors. The problem of selecting optimal fish eggs for production in hatcheries. Shirmir and Ben took home Bose SoundLink Bluetooth Speakers for their efforts!

Eigenvector Research Vice-President Neal B. Gallagher presenting Shirmir Branch with the prize for her winning poster.

Eigenvector Research President Barry M. Wise presenting Benjamin Panitz with a prize for his winning poster.

Professor Rasmus Bro joined us again this year, teaching several classes including the new “PLS_Toolbox from the Command Line.” If you want to learn how to automate analyses or make them run sans interfaces this is the place to start. We’ve found that most of our experienced PLS_Toolbox users use a mix of interfaces and command line, as do we in our roles as consultants. It is a very powerful combination!

EigenU 2025 concluded with Thursday evening’s workshop dinner, this year in Haggerty’s Sports Bar, and Friday’s “Non-linear Machine Learning for Calibration and Classification.” In all sixteen hands-on classes in chemometrics and machine learning were presented along with the two evening events. A very busy week for sure! We wish all our students the best of luck as they employ their new data science skills back at home.

BMW